Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (1983, UK/Japanese)

What popped into my head near the end of Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, was not anything about culture clash or the insanity of war (though the film has both in spades), but the idea of hysterical masculinity. Lawrence is a hyper-masculine film – from the outset, it’s all about manliness, masquerading, at times, as nobility or differing sensibilities about honor. And it’s not the calm, dutiful masculinity of many war films, or one of their closest genre counterparts, the cowboy movie, but a shrill, piercing study of what it’s like to be a man when so many different kinds of men are thrown together.

Lawrence is a strange movie – in many ways, it works to subvert its own genre by almost entirely ignoring the context of the Javanese POW camp where the bulk of the action is set. Sure, the Japanese are in charge here, but it’s not just the English they’re keeping an eye on, but the Dutch, Aussies, and in a way, even the Koreans. There’s virtually no mention of the war that rages on in the Pacific (or Europe) – the camp itself is the only real battlefront that matters, and the battle itself is not necessarily all about East versus West, but more often about what makes a man. The film is also quite marked in its entire lack of women. There are two or three in a group shot during a flashback sequence, and one story about a particular woman, but beyond this, nothing. It’s as if the removal of women forces a closer investigation of how all of these men relate in the context of only one another. There’s the suspicion of femininity, and the fear of the homosexual, obviously, and this underlies a lot of the tension between various characters. There're also the multiple implied manhoods, those of the Japanese versus the English, the idealists versus the pragmatists, the men of action versus the men of thought. And then there is the bizarre world brought forth by Major Cellier’s (Davie Bowie) flashbacks to his relationship with his younger brother. Brilliant casting, by the way – the androgynous alien as an idealistic British soldier? Bowie’s good, too, as is the rest of the cast (I had no idea that Takeshi Kitano was in this film, nor Jack Thompson). And what about the make-up job on Ryuichi Sakamoto?

Despite the fact that in the end, only one man is really left standing, Lawrence is never explicit on what kind of masculinity is “right”, or if any of them are. The movie ends on a hopeful note, a gesture of goodwill and understanding between cultures and between men. But for a film full of men and manliness, Lawrence never seems to be sure if any of it is really a good thing.